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v3rgEz writes: In the age of camera-equipped smart phones and inexpensive digital cameras, many high schoolers have never seen a roll of film or used an analog camera — much less developed film and paper prints in a darkroom. Among those that have, however, old school development has developed a serious cult following, with a number of high schools still finding a dedicated audience for the dark(room) arts.

An anonymous reader writes "Starting at 9 a.m. ET on April 15 anyone in the US will be able to buy Google Glass for one day. From the article: 'This is the first time the device has been available to the general public. So far, the face-mounted computers have been sold only to Google "Explorers," the company's name for early adopters. At first only developers could buy Glass, but Google slowly expanded the program to include regular people. Some were hand-picked, others applied to be Explorers through Google contests by sharing what cool projects they would do if they had Glass.'"

It seems like every other comment is saying something like "you better not record me or I'll punch you in the face". Why is it that the first reaction these people have is violence, instead of say, ignoring it, leaving the scene, politely asking the Glass user to stop, or even demanding that he stop? While your arguments against Glass may have merit, you're basically bringing it down to the level of "let's beat up that dorky kid with the glasses".

An anonymous reader writes "Techcrunch takes a look at why so many people seem to make fun of Google Glass. From the article: 'Google Glass isn't even on sale yet and there is already a noticeable backlash against Google's first experiment in wearable computing. It's odd to see a product that was greeted with so much hype a year ago endure the love-hate cycle so quickly – even though there are only a few thousand units in the wild. Sure, we've done our share to popularize "glasshole" as a way to describe its users, but the backlash seems to go beyond the usual insidery tech circles.'"

Every post about Google Glass is flooded with comments about "invasion of privacy", "douchebags", "dorks", "hitting them in the face if they try to film me", "blah blah". WTF is this site, Jocks' Central? What happened to "news for nerds"? You don't like Google Glass, I get it. Now GTFO and back to your Facebook to post about what a great fuck your latest girlfriend was.

Ion engines have wonderful Isp, but very low thrust. And it's not just that a journey with such an engine would be longer - low-thrust transfers are inherently less efficient than Hohmann transfers, negating some of the Isp advantage.
Moreover, you couldn't reach a nice portion of c with current ion engines: their Isp is good, but not that good. Most of them only have at most a few hundred km/s of effective exhaust velocity, limiting the maximum delta-v to like 0.3%-0.5%c under any design with realistic mass ratio.

I was pretty excited by Google+, but the whole "real name" fiasco turned me off completely. Not that I really care that much about using a pseudonym vs my real name, but I think that it just isn't Google's damn business what somebody wants to call themselves.